Tears on twins’ first day at nursery... but Only after we picked them up
DOUBLE TROUBLE FOR A FIRST-TIME DAD OF TWINS
‘LET the good times roll’, I thought, as we dropped Thomas and Emma off on their first day of nursery. Unfortunately, this wasn’t entirely accurate, as they were only going so we could earn money.
And unless your job is testing restaurant food, skiing or drinking alcohol with friends then it’s difficult to ‘let the good times roll’.
It also seemed weird to be leaving little babies with strangers. They were Government approved friendly strangers with training, but I
could see why people choose to take a break from work and raise offspring for a year or two.
In our case, the choices open to us were to put the children in nursery and work, or we could live in a tent on public land with a campfire to keep us warm while the twins played with sticks by the fireside.
Pre-school has also been very well studied by all kinds of experts and the general opinion is children do benefit from it.
It’s a little boost for their future, and since I’m planning on retiring before I’m 70, any kind of kick in the right direction towards a good job is welcome.
What we didn’t know was how they’d react to this opportunity to better themselves.
The best way to sum it up is they weren’t bothered.
Emma initially looked confused then smiled whereas Thomas just crawled off on a mission to play with a wooden train.
It was very much an anticlimax of non-committal ambivalence, so we left quickly in case things changed.
We’d decided to collect them at lunch-time and celebrated our freedom by painting the spare room
Before we knew it, the fun was over, and it was time to collect them.
We walked into the nursery as lunch was ending and were greeted by the apocalyptic sight of 12 babies sitting in small chairs surrounding a similarly sized table eating spaghetti Bolognese.
It was like a reimagined Last Supper but Jesus and all his well-mannered disciples were now babies covered in pasta and tomato sauce.
Once they’d been hosed off, we loaded them into their buggy, with the warning babies are usually very tired after the and they hadn’t had a nap.
They started crying as soon as we arrived home, followed by a nap, some more crying, before crying sporadically between mouthfuls of food. When not crying, they were gently grumbling, presumably because they were tired or more cynically, they were punishing us for leaving them. It did leave me wondering whether a 24-hour nursery might be an idea for an enterprising entrepreneur. first day,